Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey | Book Review

A Magical Murder Mystery with Deeper Levels of Humanity

The Highlights:

• science-y magic but not explained in much detail
• murder mystery BUT WITH MAGIC
• did you get that there’s magic?
• also some Real Talk about loneliness and family and growing as a person

I often wonder how much my enjoyment of a book hinges on my mood vs the book itself. Magic for Liars made me question this quite a bit when it took me 4 months to finish a book I’d normally have done in a day or two.

I liked Magic for Liars. Looking at the book as a whole, it’s well crafted, well written, with plenty of humanity rolled in to the point that Ivy Gamble and the students and teachers of Osthorne Academy could easily exist in our world. Except the magic bit, of course.

They exist in this world that’s essentially a fancy high school except students learn magical theory alongside the usual subjects, and magic itself is much like a science in itself. That part in particular was so fascinating to me and yet I still feel like I don’t have a grasp on the magic system of this book.

And maybe that’s the point? Ivy, our detective protagonist, is not magical and doesn’t understand it either and we’re seeing it through her eyes. You get just enough of the world to gain some context and then you’re moving forward again. I saw that with Gailey’s Upright Women Wanted too (highly recommend!) and I like that it’s fantasy without following the giant description dump pattern. That said… I wanted to know more! Don’t give me the cool magic system and then not tell me more about it. Some of it was so vague and cast off as over Ivy’s head so the reader needed to just accept it too and I wasn’t really buying that.

Alongside the world, there’s a dual story of the murder mystery Ivy finds herself in the middle of and her own battle with her current life situation. I’m not generally a reader of murder mysteries but I really enjoyed this one. All the clues are strewn throughout the book and while I figured out the ending twist a bit before it happened, it was in a way that was satisfying to me as the reader. Like I put the pieces together, I figured it out. Those are the best twists, in my opinion. It’s not about shock value, but a well-crafted mystery.

The other side of the story explores Ivy’s loneliness in her day-to-day job, her estrangement from her sister, and her own tendencies to push people away cause her problems time and again. It’s something she has to face in the end when given the opportunity to make a real connection with someone and while I wished the book was just a little longer so I could get more of a resolution on that one, it does show her growth as a character.

Overall, I’m really impressed with the writing in Magic for Liars so I don’t quite understand why it took me 4 months to read. It was easy to fall back into but it never held my attention for more than 5-10% at a time, and I spent those months only reading half the book, then powering through the other half in a night. Something about the story just wasn’t keeping my attention, but I enjoyed it at the end? I’m guessing part of the extended time was mood-related and some of it just the way the book is written. Basically yes, I’d recommend checking this book out for fans of a murder mystery, almost slice-of-life type story with a magical twist.